I have never been a natural navigator. My phone insists I have a decent sense of direction, but my phone has never watched me spend twenty minutes circling a roundabout in Dubrovnik, convinced I was making progress. So when I set off from Tivat Airport towards our holiday let in Sasovici, a little village just above Herceg Novi on the Montenegrin coast, I should have known trouble was brewing.

The hire car was fine. The roads were fine. The sat nav, however, had apparently taken against me. Instead of following the coastal route like a sensible person, I found myself climbing a narrow track that grew progressively more ambitious about its qualifications as a road. Olive branches scraped both sides of the car. A goat gave me a look of profound disappointment. Somewhere around the third hairpin bend, I admitted defeat and pulled over to consult a map that turned out to be a screenshot of a completely different region of Montenegro. My partner, who had been napping, opened one eye and asked why we appeared to be parked in someone's vegetable garden.

This is how we discovered the first hidden gem, entirely by accident and mild panic.

The vegetable garden belonged to an elderly gentleman called Dragan, who emerged from a stone house with a cup of coffee in one hand and absolutely no surprise at finding a lost British couple blocking his driveway. Through a combination of broken Italian, enthusiastic pointing, and my partner's unexpected talent for charades, we established that we had overshot Sasovici by a good mile and a half. Rather than simply redirecting us, Dragan insisted we stay for coffee. His terrace looked down through terraced olive groves to a glimpse of the Bay of Kotor that no brochure had prepared me for. The light was doing that particular Adriatic thing, all liquid gold and soft haze, and I found myself wondering how many other people had stumbled upon this view by pure incompetence.

We eventually reached the property, a stone villa with a pool and those characteristic green shutters you see all along this stretch of coast. It was charming, comfortable, exactly as advertised. But I will be honest: the rest of that first afternoon, I was thinking about Dragan's terrace and the unexpected kindness of being lost.

The next morning, determined to recreate our accidental discovery, we set out with no particular plan. We walked up from Sasovici rather than down towards the coast, following a path that started promisingly beside a water trough and quickly became a proper adventure. The trail wound through maquis scrub and past abandoned stone houses, the kind that make you invent elaborate backstories for whoever built them and why they left. Somewhere above us, church bells started ringing from a direction that seemed physically impossible given the topography.

We found the church eventually, or rather it found us. Sveta Gospoda, I think it was called, though my pronunciation would offend any actual Montenegrin. It sat on a ridge with perhaps six houses clustered around it, none of which appeared in any guidebook I have since consulted. An old woman was sweeping the church steps with a broom that had seen better decades. She did not speak, merely nodded and continued her work, and we sat on a wall and ate the figs we had brought and felt genuinely lost in the best possible way.

The path down took us through an overgrown orchard where we startled a tortoise the size of a dinner plate. He retreated into his shell with the resigned air of someone who has dealt with tourists before. We followed a dry stream bed that became progressively less dry, then suddenly opened into a small cove with a pebble beach and absolutely no road access. Two local boys were fishing from the rocks. They ignored us completely, which felt like the highest compliment.

That evening, back at the villa, I cooked some fish from the market in Herceg Novi and opened a bottle of Vranac. My partner asked what we should do tomorrow. I suggested we get deliberately lost again, see what else the hills were hiding. She raised her glass to that.

I still have no sense of direction. The sat nav remains in the glove box, sulking. But I have learned that some places only reveal themselves when you take a wrong turn, trust a goat track, or accept coffee from a stranger in his vegetable garden. The Herceg Novi Riviera is beautiful from the coastal road, no question. But up in the hills behind Sasovici, where the olive groves terrace down towards the water and the churches ring their bells at impossible angles, there is a different kind of beauty altogether. You just have to be willing to get a bit lost to find it.